Marat Alexandrovich Gelman[1] (Марат Александрович Гельман; born December 24, 1960 in Chişinău, Moldavian SSR) is an owner and director of Guelman's Contemporary Art Gallery, ex-owner of the Foundation for Effective Politics, and the former assistant director of Channel One (Russia).
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He was born in the capital of Moldova, then a Soviet republic. His father was famous Soviet playwright and screenwriter Alexander Guelman. He claimed that he was studying in school #37 but abandoned it due to youth problems .[2] In 1983 he graduated from the Moscow Institute of Communication. While he was in high school he worked at the Moscow Art Theatre during the evenings. He then avoided the military draft because this institute had a military chair.
Between 1983 and 1985 he worked as the head of non-standard equipment at the Chişinău television factory "Alpha". In 1985 he worked as an engineer at the Chişinău Scientific Research Institute of Non-destructive Diagnostics. Between 1985 and 1990 he was the general director of a science and technical youth center (kind of commercial companies during late Soviet time) in Chişinău.
In 1990 he moved from Moldova to Moscow, Russia and established the "Guelman Gallery" there. This gallery hosted exhibitions of Joseph Beuys and Andy Warhol, as well as many political performances.
Since 1991 he has worked with so-called political technologies (political public relations campaigns) in cooperation with the image-making company of Yefim Ostrovsky.
During the 1995 Russian Parliament elections, he was listed as a candidate in Komsomol's block "Threshold Generation" (Поколение рубежа). Together with Gleb Pavlovsky, he created the Foundation of Efficient Politics.
In 1997 he was going to start gathering voters to sign petitions for a Moscow referendum to remove the monument of Peter the Great by Tsereteli, but then stopped this due to terrorist acts (from presumably existed Komsomol's group "Revolutionary military council of RSFSR").
During the 1999 Russian Parliament elections, he was the head of election staff for the Union of Right Forces. During the elections of the Mayor of Moscow he worked for Sergei Kiriyenko.
Marat Guelman is also known as a curator of many internet-projects, both art- and politics-related:
